Sunday, 4 February 2018

Regarding the dispute over Hylas, I want to simply record that, as a young gay man growing up in 50s and 60s Manchester, and queer art historian to-be, Hylas was one of my lifelines to an imaginary world of desire found in images of men. As I knew the myths inside out the nymphs were thus nothing more than an excuse for Hylas himself, a companion to Waterhouse’s Narcissus, not far away at the Walker. - snd a precursor to seeing Caravaggios. These and an illustration of Draper’s Icarus in an Edwardian book of Greek Myths, and oddly missing from the Queer show at Tate Britain, formed an initial iconography of my own becoming, along with all kinds of other, oddly assorted images; soldiers under tropical skies in the National Geographic or South Pacific, male muscle magazines glimpsed in a book shop near the Cathedral and so on. But all of them being parts of a preparation for life. Forty years after Laura Mulvey’s critique of the male gaze, which was an attempt to understand pleasure, not to outlaw it, this rather trivial gesture can only be understood as politically shallow. But more than that as in insult to someone who has lived at a tangent to the hetero-normative discourses of which, indeed, it is a fragment.